Challenges in engaging communities in bottom-up literacies for democratic citizenship

The purpose of this article is to examine the authors’ experiences while trying to enter and engage local communities in bottom-up literacies through participatory action research (PAR) toward the community’s own collective self-development. In trying to enter five different communities, I have found several challenges and roadblocks such as mistrust of ‘university people’: legacy of the conventional outside-in and top-down research procedures for working in communities; power struggles with community ‘gatekeepers’, including ‘building keepers’; and bureaucratized project-driven community work. I consider that under the current neoliberal educational policies that are plaguing the world, for example, No Child Left Behind in the USA, self-development projects promoted through PAR can be viable ways to defy these policies and their fatalist thinking. School children’s parents and their communities are nowadays in a better position than teachers to fight for reclaiming local control of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment.